Scrutiny of scholarly publications and research data has traditionally been undertaken through peer review and proprietary bibliometrics. But should article level metrics alone be used to evaluate the impact of research? Increasingly practitioners are turning to social networks such as blogs, Twitter and Mendeley to assess the scholarly impact of published works.

NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently held a webinar to discuss the opportunities (and challenges) of alternative metrics, from issues in collecting data to interesting results of data analysis.